1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to method and systems for monitoring inventory.
2. Description of the Related Art
Inventory is a list of good and materials, or those goods and materials themselves, held available in stock by a business. Manual inventories are often performed at the expense of employee time and wages, the risk of mistakes, and the inability to provide a real time inventory report. The frequency of a manual inventory will vary based upon the needs of a particular business and the rate at which the inventory is sold relative to the typical amount of inventory on hand at any particular point in time. Inventories are sometimes counted on a monthly basis to coincide with the end of the monthly accounting cycle so that detailed management reports can be prepared.
Barcodes are a machine-readable representation of information, most commonly seen as dark ink on a light background to create high and low reflectance. Originally, barcodes stored data in the widths and spacings of printed parallel lines, but today they also come in patterns of dots, concentric circles, and text codes hidden within images. Barcodes can be read by optical scanners called barcode readers or scanned from an image by special software. Bar codes have been widely implemented as a means for identifying goods as they are purchased, such as by scanning a Universal Product Code (UPC) at a checkout register. Accordingly, barcodes increase accuracy and speed at checkout. The barcodes are typically affixed or printed onto product packaging to be outwardly facing so that they are easily scanned. A barcode scanner is often in communication with a computer system that can quickly access additional product information, such as a brief description of the item and its price.
While barcodes are very beneficial for identifying an individual item that has been carried to a scanner, barcodes have not provided a complete answer to inventory management. Theoretically, it should be possible for a retailer, for example, to scan incoming inventory from the manufacturer, scan outgoing inventory as it is purchased by customers, and determine the current inventory as the difference between these two amounts. This approach may be sufficient in some applications, but it is subject to errors caused by theft, waste, breakage, and the like. As a result, periodic inventories of the merchandise that is actually within the store are still necessary to confirm the accuracy of inventory report prepared in this manner.
Therefore, there remains a need for an improved system and method for monitoring inventory. It would be desirable for the system and method to provide real time monitoring of inventory. It would also be desirable for the system and method to monitor the actual inventory so that theft, waste and breakage are taken into account.